Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Weeks into our relationship, things were going swimmingly. I was balancing a heavy load of school work, internship, campus job & editing the school paper. We were having a typical college romance - catching lunch in the cafeteria in between classes, and then studying together in our dorms at night.

October 2007

On one of those nights, E said we needed to have a talk about something.

When I first met E, he was philosophy major with Poli-Sci and English minors. He was planning to head to law school along with Alex. But while Alex had holed up in his room to study for the LSAT, E had rearranged his semester class load to take Biblical Greek.

We sat on the couch facing each other as he shared with me that he had decided not to go to law school, but instead he was seriously considering the possibility of attending seminary. At that point he didn't know what he would do with a degree afterward, but there was a very real possibility he would become a pastor.

[In hindsight, this is probably why we didn't spend as much time talking over the summer as he was wrestling with this huge decision.]

As I stared at the wall wondering what was the appropriate response to this news (silly as it sounds, I had daydreamed about being the wife of politician or lawyer long before we had even met), E pre-empted my thoughts with an ultimatum I was certainly not expecting just weeks into our relationship.

He said he had sensed when we started dating that things would be serious, so he wanted me to know as early as possible where he was going in life in order for me to make the most informed decision about our relationship.

Without allowing much of a response, he asked me to spend a weekend thinking and praying about it, and let him know whether I wanted to stick it out.

Although the news itself was not entirely shocking, the decision that faced me was daunting. I had been dating this guy for less than a month!